Queering German Culture

Book excerpt: Contributions exploring the representation and reality of LGBTQ+ individuals and issues in historical and contemporary German-speaking culture. The German-speaking lands have a long history of engagement, ranging from celebratory to horrific, with non-normative genders and sexualities, including through cultural output, language, and politics. Queering German Culture, volume 10 of the Edinburgh German Yearbook, foregrounds this via new analyses of a variety of LGBTQ+ cultural artifacts - archives both physical and digital, literature in the form of novels and periodicals, and film both narrative and documentary - to consider a spectrum of gender and sexual identities. Individual chapters employ a range of lenses, including psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonial and queer theory, to analyze work by ThomasMann, Thomas Brussig, Jenny Erpenbeck, Terézia Mora, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Fatih Akin, among others. Contributors: Nicholas Courtman, Leanne Dawson, Kyle Frackman, Sarra Kassem, Lauren Pilcher, John L. Plews, Gary Schmidt, Cyd Sturgess. Leanne Dawson is Lecturer in German and Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh.